A History of American Literature

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

This book does not represent the work of Frost as it appears in his later volumes, but it does represent the poet himself:

A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth.

The second volume, “North of Boston,” is twice as long as “A Boy’s Will” and contains half as many titles. There would be nothing in this mathematical formula if it did not carry with it a real difference in content. But this second book is made up not of lyrics, but of unimpassioned vignettes of New England life. This is the grim New England which the poet attempted to shut out in “Love and a Question”:

But whether or not a man was asked,
To mar the love of two
By harboring woe in the bridal house,
The bridegroom wished he knew.

The book presents the death of a farm laborer, the maddened bereavement of a mother whose child is buried within sight of the house, the black prospect faced by a household drudge who faces the insanity which is an inherited blight in her blood. They are not amiable pictures, and they offer neither problem nor solution, only the life itself. They are not, however, all equally grim. “The Mountain” tells of a township of sixty voters with only a fringe of level land around the looming pile. It dominates life, limits it, and rises above it, for few have either time or curiosity to reach the top. “The Black Cottage” presents a widowed relict of the Civil War who knew only her sacrifice and whose unthinking orthodoxy was as hazy as her political creed. With liberalism in the parish, the preacher was inclined to omit “descended into Hades” from the ritual:

… We could drop them
Only – there was the bonnet in the pew,
Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache – how should I feel?

Of another sort are the poems which have most of outdoor in them: “Mending Wall,” the symbol of barriers between properties which the winters throw down; “Blueberries,” which indicates the complex of ownership in a countryside filled with nature’s gifts of uncultivated fruit; “After Apple Picking,” the weariness forced upon the farmer in his effort to husband an embarrassment of orchard riches; and “The Woodpile” with its suggestion of the slow processes of nature contrasted with the temporal efforts of man. The woodpile is discovered far out in a swamp, long abandoned and vine-covered:

… I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

The last volume, “Mountain Interval,” is something of a composite, with elements in both the former two. One reads Mr. Frost’s pages thoughtfully and leaves them in a thoughtful mood. Not all are grim, but very few are gay. They have the rock-ribbed austerity of the country from which they spring and some of its beauty, too. They are suffused with the smoky haze of an Indian-summer day.

Edgar Lee Masters (1869-) was born in Kansas in the same year with Moody and Robinson. In the next year his family moved to Illinois, which is his real “native” state. As a boy he had wide opportunities for reading. At the age of twenty-one he entered Knox College and plunged with zest into the study of the classics, but was forced to withdraw at the end of the year because Mr. Masters, Sr., would acknowledge no value in these studies for the practice of law, toward which he was directing his son. After a brief experiment in independence the young man surrendered and eventually entered on a successful career as a Chicago attorney. Yet the law did not take complete possession of him; he has always been a devoted reader of Greek literature. “Songs and Satires,” published in 1916, contains a few lyrics from a volume of 1898 which was printed, but through an accident of the trade never published. One of these ends with the significant stanza:

Helen of Troy, Greek art
Hath made our heart thy heart,
Thy love our love.
For poesy, like thee,
Must fly and wander free
As the wild dove.

Mr. Masters’s next venture was a poetic drama in 1900, “Maximilian,” a tragedy in verse which was accorded a few sympathetic reviews but no wide reading. Other works followed in the next fifteen years, some in law and some in literature. And finally, in 1915, appeared the “Spoon River Anthology.” This is in all probability the most widely circulated book of new poems in the history of American literature; others may have achieved a greater total of copies during a long career, but it is doubtful whether any others have equaled fifty thousand within three years of publication.

The most valuable single utterance on this much-discussed work is the richly compacted preface of Mr. Masters in “Toward the Gulf,” with its inscription to William Marion Reedy. Mr. Masters had submitted various contributions to Reedy’s Mirror, but had received most of them back with friendly appeals for something fresh. The first five Spoon River epitaphs were written almost casually in answer to this repeated challenge. At the same time they were a more than casual application of a hint from the Greek: a “resuscitation of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic,” assembled into an ultimate collection of nearly two hundred and fifty brief units, each a self-inscribed epitaph by one of the Spoon River townsfolk. These represent the chief types in an American country town and recognize in particular the usual line of cleavage between those who choose to be considered virtuous and those who do not care what they are considered. Unfortunately the first of these classes includes both the idealist and the hypocrite; and the second, both the conscious radical and the confirmed reprobate. A typical issue which might arise in such a town, as well as a typical alignment of forces, is described in “The Spooniad,” the closing mock-heroic fragment and the longest unit in the book.

The “Anthology” has been violently assailed as a wantonly cynical production, each assault on this ground carrying within itself a proof that the censor either had not read the book through or did not understand it. As a matter of fact the most impressive element in the book and the one which bulks largest in the last quarter of it are the victorious idealists. There is Davis Matlock, who decided to live life out like a god, sure of immortality. There is Tennessee Claflin Shope, who asserted the sovereignty of his own soul, and Samuel Gardiner, who determined to live largely in token of his ample spirit, and the Village Atheist, who knew that only those who strive mightily could possess eternal life, and Lydia Humphrey, who in her church found the vision of the poets. In spite of the protests of readers who were so disgusted with the Inferno of the earlier portion that they never progressed to the concluding Paradiso, the book achieved its great circulation among a tolerant public and enviable applause from the most discriminating critics.

“Spoon River” established Mr. Masters’s reputation and prepared the public for further thrills and shocks in the volumes to follow. This expectation has been only half fulfilled. The certainty of a public hearing has naturally encouraged the poet to more rapid production, but the subsequent books – “Songs and Satires” and “The Great Valley” of 1916 and “Toward the Gulf” of 1918 – have been divided both in tone and content between the caustic informality for which Mr. Masters was known in his earlier work and the classic finish which is a return to his unknown, earliest style.

In his treatment of sex, however, Mr. Masters has supplied the shocks and thrills expected, dealing with various aspects of passion with a frank minuteness which is sometimes distasteful and sometimes morbid. Unusually his discussions of passion are more analytical than picturesque. He assumes its existence as a dominant factor in life and discusses not the experience itself so much as its influence. Frequently whole poems are concerned with it. He takes for granted passionate love without benefit of clergy, recording it without either idealizing it or defending it. Doubtless life has included the material for the “Dialogue at Perko’s,” for “Victor Rafolski on Art,” and for “Widow La Rue,” and certainly modern poetry supplies parallels in the works of other men. In a more significant way the sex psychology of Freud crops out in many poems not ostensibly devoted to it, as, for example, in “To-morrow is my Birthday.” This soliloquy attributed to Shakespeare in his tercentenary year stands in striking contrast to Mr. Robinson’s “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” In these two poems (of about four hundred lines each) Mr. Robinson writes in the manner of Ben Jonson, paying his tribute to Shakespeare at the height of his powers in London, touching on his susceptibility to women but passing this to dilate on his almost superhuman wisdom; Mr. Masters devotes the last two thirds of Shakespeare’s monologue on the night of his last carousal to sex confessions which become increasingly gross as the bard becomes increasingly drunk. Mr. Robinson’s passage is only a few lines in length and concludes:

There’s no long cry for going into it,
However, and we don’t know much about it.

Mr. Masters’s approaches two hundred and fifty lines, begins with “The thing is sex,” continues with and ends with common brothel profanity. The popular method of justifying the Masters treatment is to gibe at the Robinson reticence as Puritan prudishness, but it is a gibe which for many enforces the value of reticence even in modern art.

Give me a woman, Ben, and I will pick
Out of this April, by this larger art
Of fifty-two, such songs as we have heard,
Both you and I, when weltering in the clouds
Of that eternity which comes in sleep,
Or in the viewless spinning of the soul
When most intense,

So much for the negative side of Mr. Masters’s work – the so-called cynicism declaimed at by the inattentive reader and the preoccupation with sex which is fairly open to criticism. On the positive side the greater weight of his work lies in poems of searching analysis. “So We Grew Together” is the changing relations of an adopted son for his Bohemian father; “Excluded Middle,” an inquiry into the mystery of inheritance; “Dr. Scudder’s Clinical Lecture,” the study of a paranoiac – dramatic monologues suggestive of Browning in execution as well as content. The reader of Mr. Masters as a whole is bound to discover in the end that all these analyses are searchings into the mystery of life. It appears in “The Loom” as it does in “The Cry”:

There’s a voice in my heart that cries and cries for tears.
It is not a voice, but a pain of many years.
It is not a pain, but the rune of far-off spheres.

…

Deep in darkness the bulb under mould and clod
Feels the sun in the sky and pushes above the sod;
Perhaps this cry in my heart is nothing but God!

And he is bound to confess that Mr. Masters, instead of being a cynic, is a sober optimist. Take the last lines of the opening and closing poems in “Toward the Gulf”:

And forever as long as the river flows toward the Gulf
Ulysses reincarnate shall come
To guard our places of sleep,
Till East and West shall be one in the west of heaven and earth!

…

“And after that?”
“Another spring – that’s all I know myself,
There shall be springs and springs!”

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879- ), born in Springfield, Illinois, of which he is the most devoted and distinguished citizen since Lincoln, studied for three years at Hiram College and then for five years as an art student in Chicago and New York. Unfortunately his drawings are accessible only in a quarto pamphlet – “A Letter to Program Managers” – which is not for sale. They show the same vigor and the same antic play of fancy inherent in his verse. In 1906 he took his first long tramp through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and in 1908 a second through the northeastern states. During these two, as in his latest like excursion through the Western wheat belt, he traveled as a minstrel, observing the following rules: